Russia admits likely defeat of Syria regime

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MOSCOW The outlook for Syria's embattled president darkened considerably Thursday when his most powerful foreign ally, Russia, acknowledged that he was losing the struggle against an increasingly coordinated insurgency and for the first time said it was making contingency plans to evacuate its citizens from the country, the Kremlin's last beachhead in the Middle East.

That assessment, made publicly by a top Foreign Ministry official in Moscow, appeared to signal a major turn in the diplomacy of the nearly 2-year-old conflict and presented new evidence that President Bashar Assad was losing politically as well as militarily. On Wednesday it was revealed that Assad's forces had been firing Scud ballistic missiles at rebels in an effort to slow their momentum.

The assessment suggested that Russia no longer sees Assad's involvement in a negotiated solution as a viable alternative. It also appeared to reflect a new recognition that Assad and his minority Alawite government, long a Russian client, cannot survive in the face of a well-armed opposition financed by Arab and Western countries seeking his ouster. Some Russian officials have concluded that Assad's foreign adversaries want an outcome decided by military force.

Further punctuating the Russian assessment was a dark view offered by the secretary general of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who said in Brussels that “I think the regime in Damascus is approaching collapse. I think now it is only a question of time.”

While senior Western officials said the basic Russian position had not shifted markedly, they welcomed the comments that were made to a Kremlin advisory group by Mikhail Bogdanov, a deputy foreign minister and Russia's top envoy for the Middle East, which were reported by the Interfax news agency.

“Unfortunately, it is impossible to exclude a victory of the Syrian opposition,” Bogdanov said. “We must look squarely at the facts, and the trend now suggests that the regime and the government in Syria are losing more and more control and more and territory.”

He predicted a bloody future with many more dead, suggesting that the fall of Assad and his government would not mean the end of the civil war, which is increasingly sectarian – Sunnis from within and without versus minority Alawites and Christians.

“If you accept this price to topple the president, what can we do?” he asked. “We of course consider this totally unacceptable.”

He said that Russia continued to urge compromise to avoid many more deaths, but he also said it was making plans to evacuate its many citizens in Syria.

Senior Western officials said the remarks of Bogdanov and Rasmussen were not tied to any major or sudden shift on the ground. Rather, these officials said, the long war of attrition had leached power and money from the Assad regime, and while the Syrian military had not been broken, it was no longer capable of regaining and retaining large swaths of territory.

A mixture of opposition fighters, with arms and training from Qatar and other Persian Gulf countries, are doing better in the field, and while some are fighting for a more democratic Syria, others are fighting for sectarian reasons, as Sunni Muslims trying to topple a minority Alawite government.

The Syrian military's use of Scud missiles, reported by U.S. and NATO officials Wednesday, reflected what they called an effort by Assad to prevent the opposition from exploiting the military airfields, fighter planes and equipment that have fallen into insurgent hands, and which the Syrian military apparently believes it cannot recapture.

The Scuds have been fired since Monday from the An Nasiriyah air base, north of Damascus, according to U.S. officials familiar with the classified intelligence reports about the attacks. The target was the Sheikh Suleiman base, which rebel forces had occupied. Syria has denied it fired any missiles.

At the Pentagon, spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said the United States would like to “commend the Russian government for finally waking up to the reality and acknowledging that the regime's days are numbered.”

But the endgame in Syria is not clear, and U.S. policy is considered hesitant and fuzzy by some allies. While U.S. and French officials insist they are not engaged in arming the opposition, Sunni leaderships in Qatar and the Gulf are doing so, as they did in Libya, seeming more interested in toppling a non-Sunni regime than in shaping what follows.

While the Obama administration pushed the creation of the new National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces and finally recognized it this week as the “legitimate representative of the Syrian people,” the coalition does not yet constitute an alternative government. And President Barack Obama himself acknowledged that some of those fighting Assad most effectively are radical Sunnis who “have adopted an extremist agenda, an anti-U.S. agenda.”

Russia has taken the view that Assad was opposed by “armed gangs” and outsiders, echoing Assad's own appraisal. Moscow has tried to maintain its supplies of weapons and spare parts to Syrian forces, ensuring that no arms embargo resolution could be passed in the U.N. Security Council.

Meanwhile, violence was escalating in and around the capital. Syrian state TV said that a car bomb went off in Jdeidet Artouz, a suburb southwest of Damascus, killing eight people.

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